POWER

Quirk found

Category: Math and trigonometry · Last tested 2026-07-04

Support matrix

Engine	Documented	Live-tested	Verdict
Excel	Yes	Not yet	n/a
Google Sheets	Yes	Not yet	n/a
LibreOffice Calc	Yes	Yes (24.2.7.2, 2026-07-04)	Quirk found

Discovered quirks

=POWER(-8,1/3) on LibreOffice Calc returned -2, but the documented/expected result is #NUM!. Confirmed via Microsoft's own community support: entering =(-8)^(2/3) (equivalent power semantics to POWER) returns #NUM! in Excel -- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/excel-calculating-exponential-of-negative-number/5c67eae2-5682-4daf-b3d6-50b22e9919c2 -- note that -8^(1/3) is mathematically -2 as a real cube root, but Excel's POWER/^ implementation does not special-case rational exponents with odd integer denominators and returns #NUM! for any negative base with a non-integer exponent; MISMATCH vs expected: expected '#NUM!', got -2

Executed test cases

LibreOffice Calc 24.2.7.2 (tested 2026-07-04)

Formula	Description	Result	Expected	Verdict
=POWER(2,3)	2 raised to the 3rd power	8	8	Matched
=POWER(2,-2)	Negative exponent gives a reciprocal power	0.25	0.25	Matched
=POWER(9,0.5)	Fractional exponent on a positive base is a well-defined real root (square root here)	3	3	Matched
=POWER(-8,1/3)	A negative base raised to a non-integer exponent has no real-number result in general (would require complex numbers), so Excel errors	-2	#NUM! Confirmed via Microsoft's own community support: entering =(-8)^(2/3) (equivalent power semantics to POWER) returns #NUM! in Excel -- https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/excel-calculating-exponential-of-negative-number/5c67eae2-5682-4daf-b3d6-50b22e9919c2 -- note that -8^(1/3) is mathematically -2 as a real cube root, but Excel's POWER/^ implementation does not special-case rational exponents with odd integer denominators and returns #NUM! for any negative base with a non-integer exponent	Mismatch
=POWER(0,0)	0 raised to the 0th power; by the near-universal 'empty product' convention this is 1 (matches VBA's own '0^0', Python, C#, and LibreOffice/OpenOffice Calc)	1	1 Real Excel (the worksheet function, and even the '^' operator) has a long-standing, Microsoft-acknowledged bug -- reproduced in Excel 2007 and 2010 and still reported unresolved -- where both '=0^0' and '=POWER(0,0)' incorrectly return #NUM! instead of 1, even though VBA's own 'x = 0 ^ 0' correctly evaluates to 1 in the same product. Recording the spec/cross-engine-consensus value (1) as 'expected' here so this exact Excel quirk shows up as a flagged divergence rather than being silently baked in as 'correct' -- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4850441/excel-formula-bug-00-gives-num	Matched

Docs & syntax

Excel: official documentation
Google Sheets: official documentation
LibreOffice Calc: official documentation